As an industry watcher, I look at trends, data, spending, technologies, yet what’s really important is watching the trend of professionals as they grow into these roles managing disruptive technologies. Update: Brian Hayashi has created a spreadsheet of this with additional info –like Twitter handles. We’re staying coordinated so the data is matched, follow Brian on Twitter.

[Connecting with customers using social technologies is deceptively challenging, as most outsiders don’t recognize the leadership to change internal cultural. Now, in public, let’s recognize those who are paving the way]

Methodology: About this List
This 2010 list is an update from the original I started in 2008, it was woefully out of date as people moved around. This list is updated, as I’ve separated the large technology section in HW vs SW and am only linking to LinkedIn accounts.

A majority of this data is based off submissions in the 2008 post, which most which are self-submissions or from their fellow colleagues and we only link to their already public profile in LinkedIn for verification. We’ve spend days compiling this data, but due to the content ever changing, we expect there to be some inaccuracies, leave a comment if you see something that needs fixing. Thanks to Sonal Mehta a student at American University who I’ve hired helped me in this research.

Read Carefully: How to get on this List
In a world of noise, curation becomes very valuable, as a result, there are very specific requirements for this list, which include: 1) You must have a public LinkedIn profile page, as this is one of the best way to verify employment. 2) The profile indicates that social media is part of your full time employee role at the corporation–not just for personal or casual use. 3) You must work at an enterprise class corporation with more than 1000 employees, 4) Must be on brand side 5) You’ll kindly leave a comment below with the submission for review. Due to excess volume, submissions by Twitter and emails or other channels will not be included, kindly leave a comment in this centralized area below.

In an effort to keep information in a tight scope, I’m not able to include folks who are doing great work in other sectors. However, if you decide to create a list for other sectors, I’ll prominently link to it from this post. Update: Here’s a growing list for non-profits.

Sign Up For Upcoming Free Report: Skillset of the Social Media Strategist
The Altimeter Group is developing a free research report, on “Skillsets of Social Media Strategists” and will identify the attributes, backgrounds, experience of this emerging role, if you’re interested in receiving a copy, please register on this form. We will use portions of the data found in this post for the research report, so thanks for helping to update it.

Social Media Strategists at Corporations
The strategist is a program manager, who mainly focuses internally rather than being the external public face like the community manager. They are primarily responsible for resources, processes, teams, they are usually internally focused and ultimately, return on investment.

Community Managers at Corporations
The community manager is primarily externally facing, and interacts with customers as the public face of the company. They are primarily customer advocates, evangelists, bloggers, community moderators, and experts at using social technologies to communicate. We honor them every fourth Monday of January on Community Manager Appreciation Day. To keep the focus tight, this list is only of corporate community managers, and not those on contract at community platform vendors or service companies on contract.

Social Media Researchers and Social Media Product Managers at Corporations
When I started this list in 2008, I didn’t have a specific slot for researchers and product managers who are creating these products. These roles are not folks who are using the technologies for marketing, support, or other business use cases (end users) but instead are researching and creating the products that the above professionals will use in their jobs.